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I’m very happy to announce that Australian-produced text adventure game, Caverns of Mordia, was officially re-released at WOzFest 5¼″.

Written by Hans Coster, it was originally released in 1980, and the game saw an update in 1982. Hans had further updates which were never released.

At the prompting of another WOzFest attendee, Hans attended WOzFest ///, and attempts were made to image an original game disk. Unfortunately, efforts to create an EDD image were unsuccessful, but a still protected .dsk disk image file was able to be provided to Hans.

A short while ago, prompted by a Comment on this blog seeking disk images for Caverns of Mordia, I began to consider releasing an update with Hans as I was aware he was working on deprotecting and updating it.

With WOzFest 5¼″ being a celebration of the 5¼″ disk it seemed a great thing to not only announce the re-release, but to prepare physical disks to give to attendees and participants.

Hans was keen, and his grandson Sebastiaan was already engaged in typing in the manual.

Once I had the manual text and a scan of the original, I began laying it out and tidying up the graphics (the original manual was printed on orange paper to make copying difficult, so the graphics needed some tidy up work).

There were 20 copies produced for WOzFest 5¼″ – attendees and participants accounted for 17 copies.

What that means for you, dear reader, is that you have a couple of ways to secure your very own copy of this limited edition disk and manual.

Firstly, one lucky Juiced.GS subscriber will be randomly drawn from all subscribers (except those who already have one of the 17 distributed copies) to receive copy #10 with their December issue. The winner will not be pre-announced – we’ll all just have to wait for the lucky winner to crow about it online! Thanks, Ken Gagne, for being willing to be involved in the re-release.

The other way to score one of the remaining copies (copies #1 and #20) will be via eBay auctions for them. I’ll be posting the eBay auctions this coming Sunday, 27 November 2016, and making announcements everywhere I can. They’ll be 10 day auctions, so bid early, and bid often!

Proceeds from the auctions will offset the production costs of the physical disks and manuals, as well as some WOzFest-hosting incidentals, and the remainder will go to Hans.

For those unlucky enough to not score a WOzFest Special Edition physical copy, there is still one small consolation prize: I’ll be posting the disk image and manual PDF on the Internet Archive to play there or download (links to come).

To any potential bidders, and all Juiced.GS subscribers, I say: good luck!

UPDATE: I’ve now uploaded the disk image and manual PDF to the Internet Archive – you can find them here.

The game is playable in your browser, or you can download for use on a real Apple ][ or via an emulator.

The manual is worth a quick read through before playing, and it has a command reference you’ll want as well. Enjoy!

[On a side note, there was a printing error I noticed on the night {page 2 reprinted in place of page 4}, and I corrected all manuals…except three whose owners declined the update {I’m not sure if this is some sort of rarity speculation}. I’ve also made a slight modification to the Preface in the posted version compared to the printed manual: I was made aware that a non-EDD disk image was able to be made at WOzFest ///, so I’ve changed the Preface to reflect that. Three versions in three days! Who’s going to collect them all?!]

Well, WOzFest 5¼″ seems to have been a successful last hurrah for my Apple ][ events this year, and a great celebration of the 5¼″ floppy disk.

Including myself, we had 12 attendees, which I think is a good size for these gatherings. The Man Cave was not bursting at the seams the way it did for WOzFest ///.

Jeremy was our furthest flung attendee, driving up from Canberra again – he really does put in the hard yards (and many kilometres) to attend, and his enthusiasm is a great addition to the WOzFest vibe.

As a special treat, my son Cal (who has been brewing up a storm at home) provided 12 bottles of apple cider for the event. Low fizz, super-dry, and packing a punch (at 8-9% alcohol), it was a big hit with some attendees (and me, who got to test a few bottles beforehand [QA is very important to me]).

It wasn’t quite to some attendees’ taste, and others couldn’t indulge due to needing to drive home – but that just meant there were more bottles for those of us able to enjoy it! I made a special numbered label for them, check out the WOzFest 5¼″ Photo Galleries post for the pics.

Our three Skype hookups started with a 45 minute video chat with Apple ][ disk cracking legend, 4am. 4am’s cracks are “clean”, meaning they only defeat the copy protection scheme without affecting the operation (or contents) of the programs themselves (unlike pirated software “back in the day” which often had parts removed to allow multiple titles to fit on a single pirated disk, and also often included “crack screens” singing the praises of the pirates and dissing their rivals).

In only a few short years, 4am has not only cracked hundreds of copy-protected floppy disks, but he’s also released an automatic cracking tool called Passport which has programmed into it his knowledge of copy protection schemes. With this knowledge programmatically built in, anyone is able to use Passport to crack disks using schemes it knows about.

For example, Jeremy from Canberra has been sourcing and cracking (mostly local) educational titles which may share protection schemes with their American sibling titles, but would never have made the journey across the Pacific and be caught in 4am’s efforts to gather as many physical Apple ][ disks for cracking as possible.

This distributed preservation effort therefore gets us closer to the aim of capturing and preserving as close as possible to all the released Apple ][ 5¼″ software titles.

Another luminary in this field is Jason Scott, noted documentarian of digital history and Software Curator at the Internet Archive – we were lucky for Jason to be our second Skype video chat for the night, and he gave us over an hour of his late Friday night.

Jason’s and the Archive’s goal is to capture everything, and the archive has a truly impressive collection of digital media and website archives. Jason has been instrumental in having uploaded software titles run directly in Web browsers via a Javascript port of emulators. This allows people to discover (and re-discover) titles of old simply by following a link to a website.

We discussed with 4am and Jason the challenges they face in their quest for software preservation, and discussed their successes so far, as well as other issues and topics related to preservation in general and specifically of software.

I’m exceedingly grateful for the time these two gentlemen took out of their Friday evenings to chat with a bunch of Apple ][ enthusiasts half a world away – both 4am and Jason have attended and presented at KansasFest, and so for those of us who have been unable to attend KFest, it was great to hear their stories.

Before we ordered pizza in, I announced the big surprise for attendees: Hans Coster (author of Caverns of Mordia) had deprotected and updated the adventure game, and attendees received a limited edition physical disk and printed manual (see this post for more details).

Once we’d eaten, we had our third Skype video call with John Valdezco of Manila Gear – he and his business partner, Jon Co (who was in attendance), announced they are developing a new No Slot Clock product for the Apple ][ line of computers.

With easily replaceable batteries, suitability for both 24 and 28 pin ROM sockets (both active high and active low chip enable pins), and an interesting “skateboard” form factor (the batteries are mounted at each end – one or both can be snapped off the main board and a lead run from the now separate batteries to the board), I think this will fill a niche in the Apple ][ market. It can also be run with one or two batteries.

Jon is still working on the driver software, but Manila Gear is hoping to have the board available by December this year.

As always, attendees worked on their own projects – or the projects others brought along – throughout the event.

New WOzFest attendee Phil brought a malfunctioning Apple //e and a few other attendees helped to check what might be wrong with it. Jon worked on the keyboard to get several non-functioning keys up and running.

Jeremy got some imaging done, including an original Caverns of Mordia disk (EDD disk image and Passport crack), two DLM software titles (which Passport was able to crack), and “How about a game of Chess!” (EDD format for 4am to look at as Passport didn’t crack it).

Leslie, as is often the case, provided invaluable support for various projects, both on the knowledge and soldering fronts – I’d say I only invite him because he’s so handy at the soldering station, except I also happen to actually like the guy as well!

Andrew (who brought some apple cider, aged double Brie and crackers – thanks!) worked on his Transwarp GS using the scalable oscillator from Craig’s to determine its fastest stable speed. It topped out at 16.25MHz (thanks in part to recently installed high-speed GALs).

Speaking of Craig, he brought along two Cortland IIgs prototypes he’s trying to resurrect (and a pile of other gear). Although “all” that was achieved was to get the keyboards and power supplies working, it was great to see these early IIgs’s. Hopefully this ongoing project will reach fruition soon.

And speaking of early IIgs’s, Adrian ducked out at some point to grab his IIgs in a //e case (an upgrade of this form was offered in the early days of the IIgs). It seems odd to see the badge on an old-style case like that.

Adrian had already brought his Apple ///+, which isn’t operational, and when he picked up the IIgs in a //e case, he also picked up his working Apple /// to bring back and play with.

A big hit with attendees was the µ-Sci Havac clone (the “missing” picture on that page is a working link to another picture) which Michael from the RCR recently scored off eBay. He’s nicknamed it “Fuglie” (which is a really apt description) but I think everyone fell in love with this ugliest of ducklings. While Caverns of Mordia wouldn’t boot on it, I’m sure Hans will do whatever’s necessary to support this market of one!

Michael also brought his recently acquired Ultima V package (including “tea towel” map), which was a nice eBay score, and some Night Owl composite video mini-LCD monitors which work well with the Apple ][ (and the Havac!) for distribution to their new owners.

I’ve no doubt missed out on some stuff that was done on the day – it always seemed pretty hectic, and, from what I can tell, everyone had a great time. Attendees, feel free to add any other details in the Comments below.

I can’t wait for the next one – I still love organising and holding them. Look for the announcement next year!

Hold the presses! OK, so this is too late to count towards my Retrochallenge entry, given that October is so well and truly over, but I have a little bit of extra info for my europlus census…

This is an object lesson in revisiting assumptions, or at least periodically checking on things you were told when your knowledge base meant you took that information on face value.

I was gifted a motherboard at WOzFest ][, and was told at that time is was an Apple ][ motherboard, not a Apple ][ plus/europlus motherboard. I was intending on using it to replace a clone motherboard in a lidless case I had and trying to get a pre-plus system going.

Some time was spent at WOzFest /// trying to get it running without success – but we didn’t have the time and resources on the night for this project. It ended up being a “some day” project and the board has been shuffled around the Man Cave while I’ve been doing other things, and without any close attention paid to it.

Fast forward to last night and while chatting in the Man Cave with Jon from Manila Gear about troubleshooting my a2heaven VGA Scaler Card, we got to talking about motherboard revisions and layout. The board was out so I looked at it to see how different an Apple ][ board was to the various europlus boards…

…and noticed the (not so) minor fact that it’s another RFI europlus motherboard date stamped 1882! If I’d even just looked at the date stamp previously I would have realised this wasn’t a pre-plus motherboard.

Given it’s case-less, that means I have more spare europlus parts than I thought, but we can never have too many of those as our systems age, can we?

So I need to make a minor addition to my europlus census as follows:

Serial number

Date Code

CPU

Notes

IA2S2-669150

no date code

65C02

wrong (apple ][plus) lid

IA2S2-667843

5182

65C02

no speaker or joystick socket

IA2S2-700105

4182

65C02

IA2S2-671330

8118

6502

IA2S2-614494

8237

6502

previously no label

IA2S2-653677

8131

6502

IA2S2-676433

8109

6502

no PSU

—

1882

6502

bare board

As previously mentioned, the mix of serial number vs motherboard vs PSU will change once I’ve gotten six boards working (for the six complete europlus cases I now have) – having eight europlus motherboards will make the task of getting six working that much easier. And I still have a clone motherboard or two for chips as well.

So I’m hoping I now pay a little bit of extra attention to my collection as I sort it, in case there are any other gems in there.

Let me know in the Comments below if you’ve ever “discovered” something hiding in plain sight in your collection you wish you had noticed earlier.

I’d noticed the frequent lament of Retrochallenge entrants about real life impacting on significant progress on entries, so I feel I entered with my eyes wide open on that front.

Whether that meant I didn’t work as hard as I might otherwise have, or that I had realistic expectations of what I might achieve, I’m not quite sure. With ongoing renovations, I like to think the latter is the case.

The bottom line is I did not complete the tasks I originally envisaged for refurbishing all of my europluses…but this month has been anything but a wasted effort, and I’ve certainly achieved a lot more than if I hadn’t entered.

For example, I likely wouldn’t have spent a day driving to our national capital to pick up two extra europluses if I wasn’t documenting the ones that I had. The chance to secure an extra two machines to go towards my collection and refurbishing efforts (well, one complete machine and one for spare parts) was an opportunity I felt I couldn’t pass up.

I almost certainly wouldn’t have paid so much attention so soon to the look of the motherboards and noticed my new favourite europlus, a motherboard from very early in the europlus’ production run. And, of course, I now have a good idea of the vintages of all my europlus motherboards, which will help me align them with their base plate serial numbers and PSU serial numbers.

Speaking of PSUs, I have now brought together all six gold Astec PSUs I have after removing them from the cases they were in (or grabbing them from my shelves if they were already removed) and I’ve opened them all up in preparation for testing their capacitors. I’ve also discovered that 110V PSU cases were repurposed/relabelled for use in europluses – I’m hoping one day to get more info on this.

While testing the PSU capacitors was a part of my original entry scope, I decided to wait until I had all six in the same open state before even considering testing them as I can then test all PSUs’ capacitors at the same time.

If it weren’t for my entry, I wouldn’t have refurbished my Disk ][ drives when I did. This was in preparation for hooking them up to my newly operational europluses at the end of Retrochallenge – I’m obviously not at that stage yet, but it’s nice to know the drives are all operational.

I don’t think I would have bought 6502s nor rubber feet yet – I now have enough of both for all my europluses for when I need them. And I also know the best solvent for removing the gunk left behind by the original adhesive for the rubber feet.

While I don’t have a comprehensive list of which machines are non-functional (nor what their problems are), I now know I have at least one working motherboard (8237). This gives me a good test base for other tasks, such as checking PSUs after testing/recapping, and possibly as a source of known good ICs and ROMs. I’ve also downloaded a copy of a diagnostics disk I can use when I continue my refurbishing work.

Overall, I’m pleased with what I have been able to achieve this month. Yes, I would have liked to be further along, but I am realistic about how much time I can dedicate to what is a hobby while work and renovation commitments are present.

I’m hoping to do a bit more work on my entry scope before WOzFest 5¼″, but I also have a heap of work to turn my attention to for that as I have some very special things lined up for it and it’s less than three weeks away!